Wednesday, 5 December 2012

Want to create mobile and desktop games?

For beginning Android game developers, it is very common that they get lost frequently and do not know where to start and get their hands wet. Especially when they get problems that they can not resolve by themself, and be jealous about the free game engine such as Cocos2d-iphone that iphone developers have. Some start to complain that game development on Android platform is too difficult, and not even a decent game engine is handy to use. Some even think that using the Java language to develop games has lower ROI.

In fact, in the real world, as Android is becoming possibily the only strong competitor against Apple IOS or even pass it, there are for sure a lot resource that are available to Android developers, including quite a lot of Game Engines. Here I will introcude the eight common Android game engines for Android game developers (Notes: fee based, low downloads counts, Not Open Sourced and the game engines that I personally do not know (-_-) are not included here.).

1 Angle

Angle is a specifically designed for the Android platform, agile and suitable for the rapid development of 2D game engine based on OpenGL ES technology development. The engine are written in Java code, and you can replace the inside to achieve according to your needs. The drawback is that there are not enough documentations, and the codes available for download contains limited sample tutorials.

Rokon a the Android 2D game engine developed based on OpenGL ES technology, the physics engine is the Box2D-, and therefore able to achieve some of the more complex physical effects. The latest version is 2.0.3 (09/07/10). Overall, the biggest advantages of this engine is that its development documentation is complete and comprehensive. And the author of the project responds to bug report and feedbacks quickly and provid fixs and solution. As a result, this framework is currently the most widely used, and lots of developers call it it called it iPhone version of Cocos2d (logic, and coding style, did looks very similiar). Several Android Game framework are developed based on this frame (fee based, membership download only) . So we do not stereotype the claims that Fee-based engines are good good, open sourced and free are bad.

LGame is a Java game engine developed by China Android developers. It has two version: Android and PC (J2SE), the highest version is 0.2.6 (31/07/10). The underlying graphics LGrpaphics packaged with Graphics API provided by J2SE and J2ME (PC version uses the Graphics2D package, the Android version of Canvas emulation for rendering). As a result, developer can directly apply J2SE or J2ME development experience . The Android version has built-in Admob interface, and there is not need to configure the XML befort you directly hard-code Admob advertising information.

In addition to the basic sound, graphics, physics, Wizard and other common components of the engine, it alos has built-in IoC, xml, http, and other commonly used Java components package. The drawback is that the jar size is relatively big, the PC version jar size has exceeded 1.2MB, while the Android version is around 500KB. In addition, the engine is also built-in the J2ME Wizard class and related components that support 1:1 rending, the vast majority of J2ME games can be ported to Android or PC version. The only shortfall is that the author of the project is a very lazy guy, development documentation promised last year still not complete, and only game example is available for download.

andengine is also an OpenGL ES technology-based Android game engine, physics engine is the same as the Box2D (standard III). The framwork is average on performance, and lack of development documentation. However, it has a lot of code examples.

Libgdx is a game engine developed using OpenGL ES technology, and support 2d Game development for Android platform, the rendering was done by physical engine using Box2D. From the perspective of performance, it is a very power game engine for Android, the drawback is that the Wizard and other relate componments are not simple enough and user friendly, and documentations are also underdeveloped.

jPCT is a standard based on OpenGL technology development, 3D graphics engine (PC environment for the OpenGL, Android OpenGL ES), based on the Java language, has a powerful Java 3D solutions. The engine and LGame (This is a 2D game engine) is similar to, with a PC (J2SE) and Android two development versions.

jPCT of one of the biggest advantage is its amazing backwards compatibility. In the PC environment, jPCT can even run in the JVM1.1 environment, because the graphics rendering jPCT internal interfaces fully comply with all the Java 1.1 specification (and even the Microsoft VM has disappeared, even the old Netscape 4 the VM is no exception ).

Alien3d is a very small volume Android 3D game engine based on OpenGL ES technology development. In order to compress the volume, according to different functions using a multi-jar release (to include alien3d-engine.jar the alien3d-tiled.jar the alien3d-sprites.jar the alien3d-shapes.jar alien3d-particles2d.jar), in fact, it The core file is only about 40KB, the sum of all the relevant jar is less than 150KB.

Catcake is a cross-platform Java 3D graphics engine, support for the PC (J2SE) and the Android environment running (has been the iPhone version of Planning). All the outstanding performance of the engine in the ease of use and operational performance, support for game development, such as wizard animation, audio processing and video playback.